ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the via the example of some key thinkers of the age, the main features of what was in fact a highly variegated Fin-De-Siècle discourse on Islam. The vastly transformed European empires that emerged at this time were, more than ever, empires ruling over Muslims. One can catch sight of this, for instance, in the optimism generated by some of the new technologies of the era, from the telephone, telegraph and cinematograph to the automobile and steamship, where the fantastic futurism they inspired offered a prominent counterpoint to the looming sense of a dystopic technological modernity. The term “civilization” had become more and widely diffused since the end of the eighteenth century, but it was not until the first third of the nineteenth century that it gained real force with the flowering of European liberal thought. Afghani found Khan’s approach troubling, despite the fact that he had sometimes proposed a similar stress on rationalism in his own writings.
